Progressive Trend Map

More fun with maps: The progressive trend

Ruy Teixeira, who wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority back in the dark ages of the early Bush 43 era when it seemed like a cruel joke, is on the Center for American Progress site with some cool toys: an interactive "how progressive are you" quiz (I scored an "extremely progressive" 343 out of 400, no surprise there) and a map of progressive trends that you can zoom down to the county level.

The map shows Iowa growing 1% less "progressive" 1988 to 2008, but its shorthand for "progressive" is the Obama and Dukakis vote. That's probably the one comparison since the 1968 realignment that would show Iowa trending away from Democrats. Michael Dukakis over-performed in Iowa and was the first Democrat to carry the state since Johnson in `64. (There was a near-miss in `76; Ford won with less than 50% and Gene McCarthy's independent vote was more than the margin.) The Reagan years were not kind to the farms, and Iowa was at the leading edge of the Democratic trend that went national in 1992. That was the first election where the map showed that upper Midwest block of Wisconsin-Minnesota-Iowa that's been a feature (now expanded with Illinois) of electoral maps since.

That said, there's interesting patterns within Iowa, with the state getting bluer in the east and redder in the west.

Clay Shirky with the best article I've read yet on The Death Of Journalism As We Know It:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Or, why Wal-Mart won't subsidize the Baghdad bureau.

No Linux Monday this week; being without my main tool the #1 laptop has slowed my productivity and learning curve. Specifically, I'm surviving on a Pentium III 550 MHz with 512 meg of RAM (in Ubuntu 8.04--this machine would barely function in XP let alone Vista), and Firefox grinds to a crawl whenever I have more than about three tabs open. Typically, I have 8 or 10 tabs open when I'm in active writing mode.

Happy 40th to desmoinesdem who gives me a shout-out in 40 Good Bloggers Over 40, a recommended diary at Kos.

And the next hot retirement spot: Detroit!